INTTRA urges industry-led standards for containers and logistics

Lee Hong Liang has written an interesting article about the call for standards in maritime documentation. To my view, it’s no doubt needed badly, and has been for years. The desires of maritime operators to work as local optimizers has hurt their presence in supply chains, which are the ultimate cooperative enterprise. That won’t do any more, especially with supply chains themselves changing so fast in the light of trade wars and operating location changes.

Devolution of supply chains is occurring, if I can borrow a word from the port governance literature. Now they are more focused on insuring end to end performance rather than perpetuating themselves to get ‘volume’. There are too many external factors driving changes. Trump’s trade wars are just the ultimate hyper-push to this trend.

Apparently INTTRA has been purchased by another firm, so it remains to be seen how much impact this will have. But the effort is much appreciated.